Cisgender Fragility

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Master's Theses Graduate College

8-2019

Cisgender Fragility

Zachariah Graydon Oaster

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CISGENDER FRAGILITY

Zachariah Graydon Oaster

A thesis submitted to the Graduate College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Sociology Western Michigan University August 2019

Thesis Committee:

Paul Ciccantell, Ph.D., Chair Elena Gapova, Ph.D. Jesse Smith, Ph.D.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deepest thanks extend to my thesis chair, Dr. Paul Ciccantell, whose mentorship, patience, and encouragement were needed and well received on many occasions throughout the process of producing this work.

Additionally, my thanks to my committee members, Dr. Elena Gapova and Dr. Jesse

Smith, whose graduate instruction in the areas of gender research and qualitative methods, respectively, produced fertile soil in which to grow and tend this idea of Cisgender Fragility. All of my committee members’ commitments of time and expertise have made this thesis a professional work that I am proud of.

I have been taught, encouraged, and enabled by many fellow academics and activists along the way whose names here are the least I can offer in honor of their contributions to my professional life (in alphabetical order): Anna Bailey, Taryn Borst, Dr. Rachel Campbell, Dr.

Mary DeYoung, Dr. Rebecca Farnum, Dr. Hermann Kurthen, Dr. Michael Macaluso, Dr. Dennis

Malaret, Bill Mefford, Scot Miller, Dr. Michael Ott, Ian Pearson, Jeff Smith, Dr. Jennifer

Stewart, Ashes Ravel, Kristine Skippergosh, Marilynn Springman, Dr. Joel Stillerman, and

Zachary Trank-Zelewicz.

Longsuffering and charitable has been my spouse, Lindsay Oaster, who has come alongside me many times whenever life struggles threw up blocks to progress on this thesis.

Invariably, Lindsay has offered professional assistance in editing, proofreading, and formatting.

The culmination of this thesis is in great part thanks to Lindsay’s years of encouragement and confidence in me. I am humbled and grateful.

Zachariah Graydon Oaster

CISGENDER FRAGILITY

Zachariah Graydon Oaster, M.A.

Western Michigan University, 2019

Cisgender people in the United States are socialized in an environment that shields them from gender-identity-based stress. Like the construct of white fragility (DiAngelo, 2011), cisgender persons exhibit defensive behavior in response to encountering any gender-identity- based discomfort. Once triggered, defensive acts and false claims are deployed in an attempt to return to a state of comfort and normalcy. The stress that cisgender persons feel, and the defensive actions that they take upon encountering such gender-identity-based discomfort is what I refer to herein as Cisgender Fragility.

This theoretical construct of Cisgender Fragility is nuanced through intersectional synthesis of queer and race theory. Transgender and gender non-conforming persons are castigated in public and private spaces as being a danger to individuals as well as being a danger to social systems, such as the economy, sports, education, and the military. Further, transgender persons in the United States are viewed as being outside moral and market conformity. These attitudes are reproduced, in part, through the rhetoric of conservative media such as Fox News.

Balancing the interests of moral conservatives and business conservatives, their discourse reverses the actual direction of danger and vilifies transgender persons as dangerous.

Using ethnographic content analysis, this study tests the Cisgender Fragility theory through coding and analysis of FoxNews.com articles pertaining to transgender persons during the first year of the Donald Trump presidency. These exploratory findings support the theory and provide a platform for future research. This thesis elucidates Cisgender Fragility.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... v

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER II: THEORY ...... 9

How Definitions of Citizenship Marginalize Transgender and Gender Non- Conforming Persons ...... 16

CHAPTER III: METHOD AND METHODOLOGY ...... 28

ECA in the Context of News Analysis ...... 30

Data Collection ...... 34

Sampling ...... 36

Procedure ...... 38

Themes From the Literature ...... 40

Motifs and Elements From the Literature ...... 40

CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS ...... 44

Theme: Transgender people as threats to the public and/or private safety of individuals ...... 45

Theme: Transgender people as threats to public systems ...... 49

Theme: Transgender persons as outside moral conformity ...... 53

iii

Table of Contents—Continued

Theme: Transgender persons as outside market conformity ...... 55

Motifs and Elements ...... 59

Conclusions ...... 101

Challenges and Limitations ...... 107

Researcher Bias ...... 107

Unknown Sources of Bias ...... 108

Credibility ...... 108

Transferability ...... 109

Dependability ...... 109

Confirmability ...... 109

REFERENCES ...... 111

APPENDIX A: CHRONOLOGICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FOXNEWS.COM ARTICLES USED IN THIS STUDY ...... 115

APPENDIX B: CISGENDER FRAGILITY STUDY CODING SHEET ...... 128

LIST OF FIGURES

1: Total frequency of themes identified ...... 45

2: Trump tweets, banning transgender participation in military ...... 53

3: Total frequency of motifs and elements identified ...... 60

4: Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender people as threats to the public/private safety of individuals ...... 61

5: Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender people as threats to public systems... 61

6: Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender persons as outside moral conformity...... 62

7: Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender persons as outside market conformity ...... 62

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

Cisgender people in the United States are socialized in an environment that cushions and screens them from gender-identity-based stress. These words mirror those of DiAngelo (2011) who makes the parallel argument in the context of race: describing white persons’ defensive triggers in response to the slightest race-based discomfort. Once triggered, defensive acts and false claims are deployed in the attempt to return the situation to a state of comfort and normalcy.

It is my contention that DiAngelo’s concept of white fragility is paralleled in the discourse and rhetoric of cisgender persons when encountering transgender and gender non-conforming-based stress – cisgender fragility. This can be nuanced and demonstrated through careful theoretical synthesis and then tested through exploratory ethnographic content analysis of articles about transgender politics in the populist conservative news outlet, Fox News.

There is not yet a specific definition of cisgender fragility, nor a foundational study seeking to enhance or improve upon such a definition. It is the intent of this inquiry to fill this gap in the literature by engaging past researchers’ definitions of fragility – White Fragility, per

DiAngelo, and Masculine Fragility, per Watkins & Blazina – and then seek to begin a nuanced discussion of how the definition of cisgender fragility may have its own unique characteristics.

As Watkins and Blazina showed, not all expressions of dominant-group fragility express themselves in the same way. Masculine fragility tends to show up in various forms of fear and self-loathing in men (Watkins & Blazina, 2010) – which rests in the power dynamic set in the social construct of the masculine/feminine gender binary. White fragility, as DiAngelo (2011) explains, is a series of outwardly defensive mechanisms that attempt to push away even the mention of race. Masculine discomfort over gender-based discussions is thus largely 2 internalized, whereas white discomfort is often externalized – causing reactions that seek to shape and control the social space. Both of these expressions, however, share a root in the dominant group’s desire to return to a sense of normalcy and comfort. This is the foundation of fragility – a desperation for status quo where the dominant group member no longer must even think about the target group, a return to the naiveté of privilege.

What is needed is a theoretical synthesis of existing materials that point this research and future research in a direction that will hone the definition of cisgender fragility. That is the first contribution of this thesis. This theoretical exposition will shed light on many questions born of the contemporary social discourse on transgender public rights and treatment. These include: why are transgender and gender non-conforming persons often castigated in the U.S. public and political discourse under the banner of public safety? What role does moral-conservative and neoliberal market conformity play in this formulation of rhetoric? How has the rise of populist rhetoric contributed to the public’s view of transgender persons and their citizenship? Why do we see the advancement of so-called “transgender bathroom bills,” the framing of transgender soldiers as an expensive, burdensome group, as well as other political moves that seek to cast transgender and gender non-conforming persons as threats to public systems such as the military, education, housing, and sports?

The second contribution to the literature is an exploratory ethnographic content analysis of articles found on the populist conservative news website, Fox News.com. This news outlet has been repeatedly heralded as a favorite by the populist Republican President Donald Trump.

In a tweet dated December 21, 2017 Trump (@realDonaldTrump) wrote:

Was @foxandfriends just named the most influential show in news? You deserve it - three great people! The many Fake News Hate Shows should study your formula for success!

Trump’s tweet was in reference to the fact that Mediaite.com, another conservative gossip site, had “named [Fox and Friends] co-hosts, Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley

Earhardt, the ‘most influential in media’ because they have captured and held Trump’s attention”

(Anapol, 2017).

While one could mine President Trump’s tweets as a primary source for studying cisgender fragility (alongside other examples of dominant-group fragility), the news outlet that supplies that president with his information and worldview -- the news outlet that predates him, and likely will persist after he is no longer president -- offers this researcher a better source for examination due to its trust as a source among those who espouse broad-spectrum conservative political ideology in the United States. It seems that while Trump’s tweets may be inconsistent and effuse, Fox News has been a mainstay in the American socio-political landscape for over 20 years.

An exploratory ethnographic content analysis of articles referring to transgender persons during 2017 on the Fox News website will seek to create and hone a codebook that will be useful in identifying modes of fragility in their reporting, and differentiate the various viewpoints found within conservatism toward transgender persons.

While it is important to recognize that cisgender fragility likely exists in some form in all cisgender persons, its public expressions in the form of public policymaking and political rhetoric are most often found and fed in conservative circles. Research shows that political, religious, and social conservatives are more likely to believe the world around them is more dangerous, and as such, tend to credulously believe that threats lie within nearly any ambiguity – that dangerousness is within nearly any group or person they do not readily understand

(Holbrook, Lopez-Redriguez, Fessler, & Gomez, 2016; Fessler, Pisor, & Holbrook, 2017).

One is likely to ask why this exploratory study focuses only on conservative responses to transgender persons. American conservative media and political discourse sets the conversational tone for ordinary people (Gamson, 1992). In the preliminary process of identifying and coding this low-hanging fruit of conservative expressions of transgender antagonism and cisgender fragility – via their most trusted form of mainstream media -- it is this researcher’s hope that future efforts can identify the pervasive and closely-held versions of cisgender fragility that may exist across the cisgender culture, including dog whistle terminology potentially found widely across U.S. media, and amidst those who hold liberal political sentiments. As with previously identified forms of fragility, the most publicly-normative expressions of this phenomenon, and their related outward antagonisms, tend to occur within conservative politics, yet to some degree affects nearly all persons within a given privileged group.

To look only, for the moment, at one conservative news source should yield a wealth of preliminary data. Conservatives in the U.S. are not a monolithic group. Conservative streams of thought do not always agree, and previous research in the field of queer theory have shown that the issue of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual (henceforth

‘LGBTQIA’ or ‘queer’) social concerns can vary in expressions of opposition or support.

Business conservatives, who choose to prioritize the politics of the Republican Party as a means to preserve and reinforce neoliberal capitalism (Hacker, 2006; Kidder, 2015), and moral conservatives, those who base their political and social beliefs largely on religious morality, are the two general divisions among conservatives found in the scholarly literature. As Marzullo

(2011) found, each has its own specific articulation of the social meaning of marriage that shapes its position on the issue of same-sex marriage – another recent political battleground in

LGBTQIA rights. On one hand, business conservatives often go along with the morality politics

5 of moral conservatives when those positions are advantageous to business. However, same-sex marriage and transgender rights are both issues in the contemporary discourse where business conservatives have shifted in their views, as supporting those traditional homo-antagonistic and trans-antagonistic moral stances has been economically unwise.

Much like with issues of divorce, birth control, and abortion before them, business conservatives have sided both with and against moral conservatives. Most recently in the Hobby

Lobby supreme court case, one can observe the syncretism of Christian moral belief with business practice through the court’s upholding of Hobby Lobby’s right to deny women in their employ access to insurance for certain types of contraceptives (Mandell, 2016; Denbow, 2017).

However, in cases of disagreement, moral conservatives maintain their opposition, as they believe that their moral stance is more important than economic gains.

In the case of liberalizing abortion law, Williams (2013) explains that the liberalizing wave of support for on-demand abortion came alongside a change in understanding of the biological stages of fetal development. In this same era the U.S. Supreme Court made the historic

Roe v. Wade ruling, effectively overruling legislative prohibitions on abortion nationwide. It was not until after this ruling that the general public received extensive exposure to the polarized positions we now know as “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” Williams argues that the polarization happened after the liberalization of the law, thus galvanizing the moral conservative resistance at the same time that society was widely integrating abortion options into medical practice. In the case of business conservatives, much like in the Hobby Lobby example, it has been the practice of business to take a middle road – often castigating the morality of abortion, while yet not directly penalizing employees for seeking abortion services. Moral conservatives maintain their

6 opposition to abortion, now nearly five decades later, as they believe their moral stance is absolute, and that there is to be no political compromise.

Not surprisingly, researchers consistently find that socially/culturally conservative,

Republican, male persons with low levels of education and high religiosity is the group most likely to espouse bigoted and discriminatory attitudes toward queer communities and their pursuit of human rights and equal standing under the law in the United States (Brewer & Wilcox,

2005; Barth & Parry, 2009; Becker, 2014; Kreitzer, Hamilton, & Tolbert, 2014). However, not all Republicans are poorly educated religious men. Which, in part, explains the major divisions described above between the business and moral streams of conservatism.

Neoliberal business interests have at times pushed back against moral conservative positions of transphobia. Most notably, during the transgender bathroom bill controversy of 2016 and 2017 (Tracy, 2017), a law was passed in North Carolina mandating that students use the bathroom denoted by their biological sex. Soon after, public outcry led the NCAA to refuse to hold its basketball tournament there – an act of corporate activism known to scholars as

“corporate exit” (Kuo & Means, 2018). Six months later, the law was repealed, and quickly, the boycott of North Carolina by the NCAA was “reluctantly lifted” (Tracy, 2017). Moral conservatives, already galvanized in their transphobic viewpoints, did not budge in their position, although the legislature of North Carolina, largely Republican, and the Republican governor of the state, were swayed by business conservative interests to repeal the law and allow for the economic benefits brought by the NCAA Tournament to resume.

Divisions are common in nearly all political ideologies, and understanding them gives us a deeper insight into the nuance behind the discourse. To give an example from within the

Democratic political party in the United States, left-leaning supporters of democratic socialist

Bernie Sanders emerged clearly as a separate group distinct from establishment liberals supporting Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary season over issues such as #BlackLivesMatter, economic inequality, and student debt relief. Similar lines were drawn between liberal neoliberal business interests (Clinton) and those advocating for a radically moral revision to capitalism (Sanders). Likewise, the ideological differences between types of conservatives can be examined through the lens of the rift over same-sex marriage and general attitudes toward LGBTQIA persons. Neoliberals across the political spectrum, including business conservatives espousing neoliberal global free market ideology, tend to support same- sex marriage far more often than religious-moral conservatives who hold to the notion that any support for LGBTQIA concerns is immoral. After all, to a neoliberal, queer people are customers who have lavish weddings, buy houses, establish family units, get insurance, and in doing so, generate profits, too.

In terms of the politicization of transgender persons, this rift between conservatives was illustrated in 2016 when moral-conservative anti-transgender so-called “bathroom bills” were being introduced and passed in legislatures across the United States -- attempting to block business owners, schools, and public buildings from instituting gender-neutral restroom facilities and from allowing persons to use the bathroom that best fit their gender identity, rather than their birth-assigned sex. Many large corporations in the business community rejected these proposed laws and acted, creating welcoming space by declaring their bathrooms accessible to transgender persons. For example, “Target announced on its website that it would allow transgender employees and customers to choose the restroom and fitting room that corresponded with their gender identities” (Abrams, 2016). Moral conservatives were outraged and, beyond political action, threatened to police public bathrooms with the intent to cause physical harm to any

8 transgender people they might find. They organized boycotts of transgender-supportive businesses. With this in mind, business conservatives and moral conservatives have overlapping uses and meanings of discourse about queer-affecting issues that at times agree and other times disagree – each pushing and pulling to create a splintered American conservative position on the social and economic value of transgender, and other queer persons.

Chapter II examines the discourse on fragility, queer theory as it pertains to the framing of transgender, gender non-conforming, and more generally, queer persons in the U.S. by conservative groups, and highlights the theories upon which the codebook for this study will be built. Chapter III details the methods of this study. Chapter IV offers a summary of the key findings of this preliminary exploration. Further, Chapter IV draws conclusions regarding how the findings compare to the theoretical literature found in Chapter II, makes recommendations for future research, and describes the limitations of this study.

CHAPTER II: THEORY

Why are transgender and gender non-conforming persons often castigated in the U.S. public discourse under the banner of public safety? What role does moral conservative and, sometimes in contrast, neoliberal capitalist market conformity play in this formulation of rhetoric? Why do we see the advancement of so-called “transgender bathroom bills” as well as other conservative political moves that seek to cast transgender and gender non-conforming persons as threats to public systems such as the military, education, housing, and sports? It is my contention in this theoretical exposition that DiAngelo’s concept of white fragility is mirrored in the discourse and rhetoric of cisgender persons – cisgender fragility.

While certainly a type of fragility can be observed in dominant gendered interactions in general, such as the masculine fragility demonstrated through fear and self-loathing in men

(Watkins & Blazina, 2010), cisgender fragility seems to more closely resemble race-based expressions of fragility due to the way that transgender and gender non-conforming persons are framed as criminal, dangerous to women, and outside the bounds of business conservative and moral conservative definitions of citizenship (Marzullo, 2011; Peterson, 2011; Westbrook &

Schilt, 2014). Cisgender fragility may span mainstream political ideologies in the United States to varying degrees, but like many other examples of anti-LGBTQ discourse in U.S. media, it is

10 exemplified and found in its most overt forms through the study of conservative political discourse found in conservative-sympathetic media outlets such as Fox News.

The organization of this paper will first offer a brief window into how transgender or gender non-conforming person self-define and offer brief insight into the differences between gender and race as those similarities and differences may apply to this research. Then, the chapter will introduce the reader to DiAngelo’s (2011) concept of white fragility and proceed to link it to what we know from critical discourse scholar, Van Dijk (1992), about how defensive mechanisms are deployed in rhetoric. Like DiAngelo, Van Dijk’s arguments are couched in racial analysis, yet are instrumental across examinations of dominant power expressions in discourse. Proceeding from there, Marzullo (2011), Peterson (2011), and Westbrook and Schilt

(2014) will provide the vital connections to synthesize how the notion of white fragility can be linked to similarly-fragile cisgender behaviors. This will include an examination of how social institutions – namely those linked to moral conservative ideology and conservative streams of neoliberal economic ideology (henceforth “business conservatives”), and their notions of citizenship – contribute to the media and popular conceptions of interactions between cisgender and transgender persons in shared public and private spaces.

Westbrook and Schilt (2014) offer two ideologies for interpreting gender. The first is biology-based, where chromosomal sex determines gender, and the second is identity-based. For the sake of this research, the identity-based approach will be used. In this paradigm, the gender of the individual is determined not only in the way the transgender or gender non-conforming person thinks about themselves, but also within the context of the way that the social world around them – family, friends, and the medical community -- accepts and validates their identity.

Thus, Westbrook and Schilt argue that this is both a process of ‘doing gender’ as the individual,

11 but also ‘determining gender’ from a community perspective. As we see later, this same social process of determining gender can be used as a means to police public spaces and enforce expectations for transgender people to change their biological body to conform to gender-binary- based social norms. However, this concept of determining gender can also be found in affirming contexts, where communities come to avow the identity-based gender of individuals, amidst their various sexual and non-sexual interactions, and form supportive systems and opportunities for growth.

Thus, for the sake of this research, it is unhelpful to look at gender from a biological perspective, where reproductive capabilities and chromosomes – biological sex -- become the basis for gender definitions. For transgender and gender-non-conforming persons in the United

States, ‘doing gender,’ and how society contributes to their ability to exercise their identity-based gender (‘determining gender’) becomes the basis for how bigotry, ant-transgender policymaking, and cisgender fragility take personal effect. This is regardless of whether the transgender person is biologically capable of reproducing (as many indeed are), or whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, or identify in some other way along the sexuality spectrum (Galupo,

Hanise, & Mercer, 2016). In terms of an individual ‘doing gender’, the onus is on self-definition and one’s ability to live that identity in day to day life amidst a complex social world. In terms of

‘determining gender’, one’s reproductive ability, sexual orientation, or biological sex (genitals and/or chromosomes) often regresses into the background when other factors, e.g. an individual’s ability to “pass” as a member of a binary, or an individual’s connection to an affirming community (or not), may have a much deeper effect on their ability to live that day to day life free of harassment and violence. So, for example, if a transgender man was pregnant, it

12 would be unlikely that their demonstration of ability to biologically reproduce would assuage cisgender fragility, or bigots seeking to harass or harm.

Therefore, I would argue that in the context of fragility, race and gender identity have a great deal in common and can be used for theoretical comparison and contrast. As we know from

Omi and Winant’s classic (1994) formulation, race is not ultimately the result of some unchangeable biological blood root. Rather, it is a social category – a construct – rooted in the social: lawmaking, science, social interactions, history, place, and the many things that make meaning. For the sake of cisgender fragility, the Westbrook and Schilt (2014) formulation acts in a similar way – defining the construct of gender identity as situated amidst that same social world, rather than being the result of some biological sex, reproductive, chromosomal, hormonal, brain chemical, or other root. These constructs – race and gender identity – are not the same, but what is similar is how social interactions and structures serve as mediators to those who are categorized based on these constructs.

In the theoretical tradition of Bourdieu, DiAngelo (2011:58) argues that White fragility is a “product of the habitus”… a “condition” brought about by the “white structural position.”

White people want to seek an equilibrium once it has been disrupted by a racial challenge to their state of normalcy, and as a result, engage in mechanisms to deflect the discomfort. In the case of race, this often manifests in the form of any mention of race. Thus, any discussion of race, or even the presence of black persons in white spaces, is enough to trigger feelings of intense discomfort and defensiveness among white persons.

In the context of transgender issues in the contemporary discourse, it seems that

DiAngelo’s arguments can extend beyond race. Anti-trans groups and politicians often cite unfounded safety and security concerns as a means to castigate trans persons. In this way,

13 cisgender persons are discursively set up as victims of the so-called perversion and potential for violence within any and all transgender persons. This false victim narrative is parallel to

DiAngelo’s (2011) analysis of white victim narratives. This is a phenomenon that she labels

“self-defense claims” (p. 64). White people, like many other dominant groups, are found to employ narratives of being “victimized, slammed, blamed, attacked, and being used as punching bags” – when in fact they are merely coping with discomfort rather than experiencing any real oppression. The author explains how this discourse “perverts the actual direction of danger that exists between whites and others” (p. 65). Real oppression becomes “profoundly trivialized” when whites are offended or insecure at “merely talking.” At the same time, DiAngelo (2011:

64) argues that this discourse of (false) victimization also serves to “position the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social locations,” serving to “blame others with less social power for their discomfort” and “falsely position that discomfort as dangerous.”

Cisgender groups often argue that transgender persons who use the bathroom most befitting their gender identity are a threat to (cisgender) women – increasing the risk for rape and other bad acts. Evidence shows that such claims are erroneous: "There has never been a verifiable reported instance of a trans person harassing a cisgender person, nor have there been any confirmed reports of male predators 'pretending' to be transgender to gain access to women's spaces and commit crimes against them" (Bianco, 2015). So the alternative explanation is that these false claims are rhetoric used to construct a gendered challenge to the state of cisgender normalcy. These claims are used to deflect discomfort over the mere presence of transgender persons in public, dominantly cisgender, spaces.

Van Dijk (1992) uses the example of racial discourse in the United States to point out how discourse and rhetoric are deployed as a means of reifying oppressive institutional social practices and castigating oppressed groups through the use of false victim narratives. He gives several racial examples of how dominant groups claim “reverse racism” (p. 103) and make the claim that someone needs to “protect the white majority” from freeloaders, criminals, and those who might take advantage of the goodwill of a tolerant society in a way that would destroy that very society. This is a folk hero narrative where those who maintain the status quo are standing up against the “real racists” -- those accusing society of racism (p. 104). This ideology posits that anti-racists are just censors in disguise, or the “loony left” who seek to undermine venerable institutions – like police or democratic government. The author observes the uses of terms like

“fair” and “balance” in light of how they can be employed in political rhetoric to dispel idealism and posit instead “realism” that altruistically argues away humanitarianism (p. 111). Van Dijk states that worry and manufactured security issues can be forms of attack that reinforce bias and hegemony through creating moral panics.

To extend Van Dijk’s theory to observe our contemporary culture colloquially, often cisgender pundits and politicians argue that they merely seek to protect the cisgender majority from the potentially perverted and misguided dangers presented by transgender persons (Abrams,

2016; Tracy, 2017). Further, these spokespeople regularly suggest that “bleeding heart liberals” and other tolerance- and inclusion-based organizers are unable to see the criminal potential of transgender persons. Thus, in this false-victim paradigm, anti-trans apologists are presumably realistic, even-minded folk heroes who only seek to balance out the destructive force posed by transgender activists and advocates.

Westbrook and Schilt (2014) explain that in the daily lives of transgender and gender non-conforming persons, social systems are not only oppressive, but that oppression is made more complex by varying systems of criteria that at times require transgender persons to participate in society in different ways based in the acceptance or denial of their biology or identity – depending on the type of space and social situation. These are concerns unknown to cisgender persons, who never are required to consider such shifts, often referred to as code- switching. The inability for cisgender people to determine the gender of a transgender or gender non-conforming person results in “panics” where “biology-based gender ideologies reign” (p.

50).

Westbrook and Schilt (2014) argue that in the course of doing gender there is also this secondary social act which they call “determining gender.” It is in this process of placing people into gender categories that society shows its inconsistencies across social spaces regarding gender identities and norms. This is especially made evident through contemporary discourses about transgender rights in public spaces, such as bathrooms, school environments, and in processes like employment and sports. Gender-segregated spaces are more likely to use gender as a biological absolute (genitals), whereas integrated spaces tend toward acceptance of identity.

They argue that men’s and women’s spaces are not policed equally by society, thus women’s spaces – such as public bathrooms – become the spaces subject to the most public scrutiny and proposals for social control.

The connection between transgender identity and social response, especially as it pertains to the arguments that anti-transgender laws and efforts to protect women and children, thus are billed as justified, as is the reification of the gender binary and the maintenance of the status quo system of sex, gender, and sexuality. Upholding the gender binary and reifying notions of

16 acceptable determination of gender return equilibrium to a system that is upset by the mere existence of transgender persons, to use the language of DiAngelo.

How Definitions of Citizenship Marginalize Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Persons

To look at how transgender and gender non-conforming identities are othered and castigated by society, Marzullo (2011) argues that one must look at the uneasy interplay between moral conservative (which Marzullo calls “neoconservative”) and business conservative (which

Marzullo calls “neoliberal”) perspectives in order to see how normative notions about LGBTQ persons and their rights to citizenship are socially constructed in the United States. Marzullo uses the case study of same-sex marriage to model examples of this interplay.

Marzullo (2011) examines the marriage equality discourse in the United States using

Critical Discourse Analysis of ethnography, and points out how neoliberal values and norms impact the way in which marriage discourse is framed. Namely, the author posits that globalized free market neoliberalism emphasizes three concepts: autonomy, individualism, and responsibility, through which marriage – including same-sex marriage – can play a role in reinforcing neoliberal social ideals and expectations, especially in the context of conservative business streams of neoliberalism. At times the author also posits how moral conservative ideology can overlap and/or conflict with this business-conservative framework. It seems that when moral-conservative ideology overlaps favorably with market neoliberalism it is because certain moral narratives can reinforce normative behaviors that also reify market and consumer ideals. For example, marriage can be a moral arrangement. But, marriage also sustains class structures while acting as a market force to contractually limit and entitle certain people with rights and responsibilities. Meanwhile, marriage acts as a social institution, excluding others who

17 do not choose to conform to certain social expectations that might warrant those rights. Marzullo uses college education as one example of a prerequisite to access to marriage, as those who are not college educated find it harder to secure marriage (Marzullo, 2011; Torr, 2011).

Marzullo warns against seeing neoliberalism as a stable hegemonic force, rather she encourages us to see how (N/n)eoliberalism and moral conservatism “are often seen moving together: disarticulating then rearticulating the uses and meanings of marriage and thus creating disjunctive and contradictory impulses on the subject” (Marzullo, 2011: 762). In this same way, ideas like ‘freedom’ and ‘activism’ are recast in the mold of market and consumerism, choice and consumption. So, put another way, as business conservatives take up free market neoliberal capitalism, they interact with moral conservatives. These are groups continually moving alongside each other due to the common political ties they share in the United States (namely, the Republican Party), bumping against one another in both complementary and challenging ways. These points of contact often result in changes in the ideology of both groups, thus instead of thinking of these groups as stable and unchanging, Marzullo urges us to see how they continually shape each other, not always in agreement with one another.

It is the very example of ‘freedom’ through which Marzullo explains that autonomy is a core tenet of neoliberalism. Freedom is “the autonomous ability to participate in the marketplace,” not “the freedom to be protected by certain basic human rights or citizenship rules” (Marzullo, 2011: 763). After all, neoliberalism is at root an economic ideology with political and social ties, not a socio-political ideology unto itself. In this way, autonomy only offers access to those who conform to the norms and ideals of the market: e.g. participation in higher education, detachment from and obscuring of “historical and socioeconomic contexts,”

18 participating in the normative construct of marriage (so that one may secure their position in the market system), etc.

There is a connecting point where race, class, gender, and sexuality all appear to be treated similarly by neoliberal ideology. Namely, that autonomy, individualism, and responsibility, as elaborated by Marzullo, are the tools by which the market ideology of neoliberalism as free market governance becomes the tool for political and social validation and recognition of groups and identities (Brown, 2005; Foucault, 2008; Marzullo, 2011; Ferguson &

Hong, 2012).

Individualism emphasizes the role of the individual under the guise of being one’s own person (‘autonomy’) but negates the classic liberal notion of a responsibility to the commons.

Therefore, personal responsibility for one’s self is total, and “social risk (poverty, unemployment, disease prevention, etc)” are disassembled from the social sphere (Marzullo,

2011: 765). It is in this same narrative that responsibility itself becomes a tool wielded in the matrix of domination by neoliberalism through marriage to “uphold status quo inequalities, especially in regards to a racialized class stratification” (Marzullo, 2011: 768). The author points out that this narrative of marriage obscures ongoing injustices that are suffered by LGBTQ persons – especially in intersections with race and class. It is in this way that marriage, once

‘given’ to LGBTQ persons, can be used as a state excuse to erase responsibility to citizens and instead appeal to the personal responsibility of individuals: e.g. through denial of social injustices/inequalities, assertion of equal rights under the law, an appeal to “universal diversity and cultural inclusiveness through marriage as a way for individuals to prosper by turning to our families for support and away from the state, and each other, for help” (Marzullo, 2011: 770). It is in this way that the privileged “white and/or middle class may simultaneously argue that

19 marriage should be for them, while unintentionally supporting the more negative sides of the institution.”

Legitimacy in the social world -- access to social capital, political capital, and as expected, economic capital -- all flow from conformation to neoliberal interpretations of values.

Groups are told to conform to these conservative economic and political hegemonic values, and in exchange, they are offered legitimacy and validation. However, as Ferguson and Hong (2012:

1060) show in this example from across the pond, “a hegemonic deployment of sexuality and gay rights by nations within the European Union facilitates the persecution of people of color communities, generally, and Muslim communities, increasingly.” They go on to argue that neoliberalism manipulates this access to political and social legitimacy to leverage one identity or group against another, cover over racist and colonial histories, or obscure conservative persecution of one group while claiming progressive favoritism of another.

Conservative political ideology in the United States is shaped largely by the discourse purveyed via conservative news outlets, such as Fox News. The following explanation of the connection between conservatism as an ideology, and conservatism as purveyed by news media knits together later in this theory to show how these systems affect marginalized persons in gender-queer and transgender communities.

Conservative media outlets cater to both moral conservative and business conservative audiences. They walk a tightrope between discourses which bolster the primacy of markets, business, and consumerism while simultaneously attempting to assert a moral conservative ethic of normative behaviors and identities. Peck (2014) argues that Fox News posits itself as the representative of the downtrodden, yet it achieves this by representing its spokespersons as

“protectors and advocates of traditional moral-economic principles” (Peck, 2014: 528), rather

20 than advocating for policies that actually benefit the working class. Thus, it appears that Fox

News is no stranger to the idea of claiming to be representative of a viewpoint (e.g. speaking up for victims), who they then have no trouble redefining as whatever they wish (e.g. positing powerful dominant groups as victims, and their pundits as the protectors and advocates of those victims and the upstanding principles they represent). This is entirely consistent with the neoliberal legitimacy manipulation offered by Ferguson and Hong. It is this way in which Fox can draw lines between the whitewashed words and advocacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and those who shame persons of color for speaking out today against racial injustice by doing it ‘the wrong way’ – such as by not adhering to elite white social boundaries and civility standards.

Previously these ideas would represent “divergent material interests,” but by evoking and modifying populist rhetorical traditions, Fox News can “give viewers compelling moral logic”

(Peck, 2014: 528).

Peck (2014: 528-529) offers that “all populist discourses… dichotomize society into two opposing camps.” In its coverage of the Great Recession, this author proposes that Fox used populist discourse to “protect and strengthen the hegemonic hold of conservative economic ideas in the face of crisis.” They posited working people as victims, drew lines between working people and ownership-class persons, and then posited all of them together as victims in the same boat. Thus the hegemony was not the problem, the conservative economic principles were not the problem, and even the elite ownership class was not the problem – rather, the problem was the welfare queens, the “takers.” The author posits that this is a “moral rationale” (Peck: 2014:

529). This method of false victim narratives is “fraught with profound contradictions.”

Discursive redirection and concealment is deployed in order to make this new creation of the

“producing class” look as both the successful many, but also the marginalized/victimized few

21 fighting against the many who presumably wish to undermine them. Business figures are presented as unbiased and a-political (Peck, 2014: 532). Terms like “successful” are used instead of “rich.” Thus, successful people are the hardest workers and the most moral. Thus, “punishing” the successful by taxing them is both immoral and worthy of the defense of the (actual) working class (Peck, 2014: 530). Using terms like “silent majority” also works in this way.

In analysis of Peck’s work, it seems that Fox News is able to link together previously disparate class and market stances in order to recraft and elevate conservative ideological positions. Neoliberal language of productivity reinforces the business conservative bootstrap narrative of personally responsible behavior, and validates meritocracy ideology, erasing attention to class inequalities. Moral conservative language validates this productivity narrative as moral, and thus links normative behavior as a participant in the market as an act of civil religion. In these frames also reside entrenched ‘moral’ cisnormative and heterosexual identity and privilege, as seen earlier in Marzullo. The deployment of this veiled business-conservative and moral-conservative-reconfigured rhetoric mitigates the audience’s sensitivities to overtly bigoted and homophobic discursive strategies in favor of civil business and religious discursive frames.

The public’s capacity to humanize LGBTQIA persons diminishes when business conservative and moral conservative discourses are deployed and reinforced through media.

Peterson (2011) explains the social context of homophobic rhetoric, and how the neoliberal ideology within business-conservative economic and social framework enables groups such as the Family Research Council (American evangelical James Dobson’s political lobby) to deploy dog-whistle politics and discourse to create homophobic narratives and produce governance claims. Peterson (2011: 745) posits business conservative homophobic discourse as representing

“a powerful and destructive exclusionary technology that we must not ignore.” He offers that the

FRC very deliberately frames lesbian and gay people as non-citizens/subjects. They are “direct threats” to the “heteronormative nuclear family” (Peterson, 2011: 746), thus this ‘family’ becomes a victim of the lesbian and gay “alternative family forms” (Peterson, 2011: 749).

Peterson illustrates these castigating framing stories using a variety of examples: The

FRC does not use lesbian and gay frames in the same sentence with the word ‘family’ in order to depersonalize and dehumanize lesbian and gay family relationships. Queer researchers argue that capitalism has been the force largely responsible for destabilizing families (Marzullo, 2011;

Peterson, 2011), yet Peterson argues that groups like the FRC scapegoat lesbian and gay families as the cause of social instability. The FRC uses quotation marks in their documents to ironize and mock lesbian and gay legitimacy. Peterson says that “under the rhetorics of privatization and responsibilization, citizenship is maintained not through appeal to one’s status as a citizen of a nation or territory and its constitutional guarantees but through proper self-management or proper self-regulation, which, in turn, grants the individual access to citizenship and rights as a reward for responsible action” (Peterson, 2011: 750). In the neoliberal business conservative paradigm, knowledge and skills are viewed as commodities among adoptive parents, and one’s conformity to prescribed conservative social roles are prerequisites to the granting of familial responsibility governed by state and religious agencies, such as adoption.

In agreement with Peck, Peterson posits that anti-queer rhetoric is going through a transition where it is no longer acceptable to use purely biblical references to justify homophobic values. Rather, now changes are being made to deploy neoliberal rhetoric to homophobic ends.

Thus, business conservative rhetoric has become a tool of dog-whistle politics, in the same way that discussions of state benefits (like social welfare, food stamps, etc.) have been used in the

23 past as thinly veiled racist critiques. Business conservative rhetoric is now used to reinforce homophobic propagandas of fear, religious narratives, and the positing of dominant groups as victims (e.g. heterosexual couples, cisnormative individuals, etc.).

Conservative news outlets such as Fox News cater to both moral conservative and business conservative principles. They walk a tightrope between discourses which bolster the primacy of markets, business, and consumerism while simultaneously attempting to assert a moral conservative ethic of normative behaviors and identities. So, to return to the example of same-sex marriage for a moment, it is apparent that businesses largely support same sex marriage as a function of neoliberal market ideology. On the other hand, moral conservatives oppose same sex marriage on religious and/or moral grounds, which is at times in conflict with business conservatives. Neoliberalist social, economic, and political privileges are being mediated to lesbian and gay couples by business conservatives, who, while seeming supportive of same sex marriage, also desire to sell marriage equality as a “final frontier” of LGBT citizenship. This obscures ongoing injustice and oppression (like the fact that LGBTQ persons can still be fired or denied housing, or difficulties in access to healthcare, or increased poverty among certain populations, structural violences, etc.), and seeks to recast such accusations as mere breaches of personal responsibility on the part of individuals. This then fits into moral conservative notions that people in marginalized groups deserve their life positions and that their circumstances are of their own creation, likely due to their moral degeneracy, rather than, again, systemic social inequalities. All of this is useful as it helps to explain the complexity of the conservative discourse that any reader is likely to encounter in media articles reporting on transgender bathroom bills, President Trump’s ban on transgender persons in the military, and

24 the queer community’s struggle to retain civil rights to employment, housing, education, and other structural systems.

These conservative groups’ approaches to citizenship are important takeaways, as moral conservative citizenship is “maintained not through appeal to one’s status as a citizen of a nation or territory, and its constitutional guarantees but through proper self-management or proper self- regulation, which, in turn, grants the individual access to citizenship and rights as a reward for responsible action” (Peterson, 2011:750). In the moral conservative paradigm, citizenship is afforded to those who adhere to their religio-moral logic. For business conservatives, citizenship is based on participation in the market, granting adherents citizenship. Adherence to social conventions opens doors to these marketplaces. Conventions reify social institutions, and conversely exclude others who do not choose to conform to certain social expectations that might warrant those rights. Together, these constructions of citizenship form the basis of exclusion of gender non-conforming and transgender persons in ways that allow for cisgender fragility to paint them as evil others – and simultaneously bolstering their claims to cisgender victimhood and terror. This is why it was an easy sell for President Trump to propose that transgender persons were creating an over-burdening drain on military costs. This is an obvious appeal to the business conservative ideologues who are highly sensitive to these types of economic appeal.

This approach to citizenship has an effect that cuts both ways. As stated earlier, neoliberalism becomes the tool for political and social validation and recognition of groups and identities (Brown, 2005; Foucault, 2008; Marzullo, 2011; Ferguson & Hong, 2012). In one context, this invalidates those who are deemed outside the religio-moral and market-conventional paradigms. For these persons, citizenship may be withheld or partially doled out as the group conforms to varying degrees of the conventional interests. Looking intersectionally and

25 historically, marginalized identity groups find themselves being granted access to the market and access to human rights not all at once, but piecemeal.

It is in this way that white fragility still appeals to colorblind ideology, which in turn continues to deny the human rights concerns of people of color in contemporary society – a society that proclaims the explicit interest in having people of color have equal access to the marketplace. In this same way, same-sex marriage and other conventional advances made in access to markets and participation by LGBT persons becomes cover for the latent human rights problems still facing the LGBTQIA community.

Sports managers can make a fuss about the passage of an anti-trans bathroom bill, perhaps, but the news media covering it may talk more about the economic fallout than the human rights violations being inflicted on the transgender community. Media articles might discuss a specific ‘controversial’ bill or law, but the context – a long history of bigoted and discriminatory laws -- is left out of the analysis. Instead, the focus may remain entirely on the political fallout, or the economic losses the state may suffer, or the politicians themselves and how difficult it is for them to do their work in a world where ‘both sides’ are in such disagreement.

However, there are other contexts in which the neoliberal citizenship paradigm opens doors for those deemed to be inside the normative structures. Thus, if a business owner wishes to post bigoted anti-transgender signage, their actions, depending on their region, customer base, and the local social context, may be seen as ‘controversial’ yet not unacceptable or overtly bigoted. Media articles covering these issues may present the facts such that the ‘two sides’ are merely differences of opinion – even when the sides are a bigoted business owner placing overtly anti-transgender signage in their storefronts, or encouraging violence against transgender people

26 who may use their restaurant’s toilet, and the other ‘side’ being transgender persons and their allies seeking to end such bigotry and denounce the owner’s actions as unacceptable. In such cases, the business owner, who has been granted full citizenship by the neoliberal and religio- moral paradigm, may see the benefit of the doubt far more easily, as the default, with their bigotry (and its effects, like its potential to incite violence) being presented as a mere difference of opinion, a ‘controversy.’ Those in the margins, granted only partial citizenship (marriage rights, but not job security, housing security, etc.) are not granted such a default. This default becomes the basis for the latent content of analysis of such media -- as what is left unsaid or assumed becomes the basis on which hegemony is left unacknowledged and uncriticized.

And so, this chapter has come full circle in theoretically explaining the circumstances faced by transgender and gender non-conforming persons in the United States when confronted with cisgender fragility. This chapter has also made an effort to synthesize a number of different theoretical perspectives from other areas of specialization in order to construct a plausible basis for future research. This basis, in the most straightforward terms, is to suggest that DiAngelo’s notions of White Fragility are an adequate framework to begin examining a similar phenomenon among cisgender persons. I have added the context of interplay between moral conservative and business conservative ideological agendas in order to equip the reader with a deeper understanding of the discursive means by which these ideologies persist and replicate intersectionally in U.S. media and politics. It is the hope of this author that researchers might take up this theoretical challenge, beyond this present study, and address the original questions posed in the introduction, alongside the additional challenge of acknowledging the role of the oppressors. So often the dominant group’s behavior is left largely unexamined by researchers.

Cisgender persons, like white persons for DiAngelo, are worthy of scrutiny – as it is within the

27 examination of their defensive behaviors that we begin to see the way that oppressive practices persist and are reified through lawmaking and political platform building.

CHAPTER III: METHOD AND METHODOLOGY

In this chapter I will explain the method and methodology of this exploratory study of cisgender fragility. The method chosen for this study is ethnographic content analysis, henceforth referred to as ‘ECA.’ This technique was developed by Altheide (1987:65) who argues that ECA offers a useful alternative to traditional quantitative content analysis or other forms of qualitative content analysis, as it is oriented toward “reflexive analysis of documents.” This reflexivity comes in the form of embracing the fieldwork principles of ethnography-- that is, treating content analysis as a form of field-work research, placing documents in context. Altheide (1987:

66) describes that context in this way:

In general, ethnography refers to the description of people and their culture (cf. Schwartz and Jacobs, 1979). In this sense, the subject matter-human beings engaged in meaningful behavior- guide the mode of inquiry and orientation of the investigator. However, if the meaning of an activity remains paramount, ethnography can also be considered a methodological orientation independently of a specific subject matter. Products of social interaction, for example, can also be studied reflexively, looking at one feature in the context of what is understood about other features, allowing for the constant comparison suggested by Glaser and Strauss (1967).

What is of particular interest here is the way in which this method can be applied to a particular people and their culture. The inquiry is centered around this notion of how that people and their culture create and maintain meaning, and then through that shared meaning engage in certain types of behaviors and interactions.

It is in this way that ECA offers this particular study a means of placing the qualitative content analysis of the documents I will find on the Fox News website within the cultural meaning structures of American conservative discourses. As elaborated in Chapter II, researchers using the method of critical discourse analysis (‘CDA’) have already done the heavy lifting of

29 establishing a differentiation of conservative cultures, and then identifying a number of patterns and rhetorical devices that are common within these cultures. ECA is well-suited to begin with those preconceived themes, which present in the form of research questions. Emerging themes can them be examined throughout the circular process of open coding and analysis. New and/or revised research questions emerge and evolve through this reflexive process, and then eventually, discussion and the answering of questions (Altheide 1987, 1996).

ECA is defined by its connectedness to theory and purposive sampling. Rather than seeking a quantitative randomized/stratified sample, ECA “is used to document and understand the communication of meaning, as well as to verify theoretical relationships” (Altheide, 1987:

68). This method thus relies on the intuition and interactivity of the researcher. Some themes are present at the beginning of the study, derived from theory, and yet additional themes are investigated and allowed to emerge in order to verify, test, nuance, and dispute theory. ECA strives toward both an analytical approach and toward what Altheide (1987: 69) calls, “good descriptive information.”

One might ask why I do not carry on the method of CDA in this study, as much of my theory has derived from its methodological use? I argue that CDA, as seen through the methods of the authors in Chapter II, has some extraordinary benefits in terms of the depth of its qualitative analysis. It is exceptionally suited for examining every level of text, from the most minute word choices upwards to overarching themes (Van Dijk, 1992). However, it does not lend itself well to small scale exploratory studies. CDA deploys a level of depth that may be better oriented toward later explanatory testing of this notion of cisgender fragility, or the substantive differences between manifestations of varying types of fragility.

ECA is best suited to explore at the level of themes – identifying known rhetorical devices, taking notice of emerging or unexpected devices -- and then locating the discussion of these themes within the cultural meaning structures of established political and social groups for the sake of an adequate description. My hope is that this description can be the groundwork for additional multi-level inquiry, testing, and theory development.

ECA in the Context of News Analysis

ECA been used to great effect in studying conservative expressions of discourse in the mass media. Gormly (2004) used ECA to show how The 700 Club, a nationally popular evangelical news and propaganda program, framed the whole of Islam as militant, radical, and terrorists during the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Pat Robertson, the show’s host, would regularly take on different roles – prophet, news anchor, charismatic leader, and pastoral guide in order to convince watchers that Islam is a “heretical threat” (Gormly, 2004:

231) where every adherent is a terrorist and consumed by Satan. Likewise, Robertson argued regularly that the United States is a Christian nation and that as such, God would bless or curse the whole of the nation based in our collective behaviors. Behaviors that did not fully embrace his bigoted anti-Muslim worldview would be evidence of the “End Times,” signaling the return of Christ, the reward of the faithful, and the retributive punishment of everyone else. In this way,

Robertson serves as the conduit for his audience to make sense of the secular world through the lens of their shared Evangelical beliefs. Thus, Gormly shows how ECA is effectively deployed within the setting of conservative media and discourse analysis in order to evaluate previous theoretical claims and clarify emerging themes.

Islam was the subject of study by Laird, de Marrais, and Barnes (2007) when they evaluated how Muslims were portrayed by U.S. and Western European medical professionals, as represented by abstracts found in the MEDLINE academic journal index. Laird et. al show how

ECA can be effectively deployed to observe, extrapolate, and evaluate both the manifest

(explicit) and latent (implied) views, meanings, and themes found in these abstracts. They showed that the way that medical professionals refer to Muslims can often indicate a worldview that asserts manifest western interpretations of Islamic beliefs, practices, and tenets. They also showed that medical professionals’ latent views often castigated Muslim practices as a risk to their health and wellbeing and that Islam presents an obstacle between ideal Westernized biomedical healthcare and the patients who practice the religion.

This nuance to observing both manifest and latest content is important in the study of Fox

News as it relates to cisgender fragility, especially as it pertains to the contrast between the stated values of the outlet – such as their slogans touting being “fair and balanced,” and their latent castigation of transgender persons as being synonymous with pedophiles and sexual predators.

Neither of these latter claims can be substantiated by a “fair and balanced” evaluation of the evidence (Bianco, 2015; Samar, 2016). It is through identifying such contrasts that one can begin to illustrate the wider theoretical construct of fragility. Fragility is illustrated by the juxtaposition of a relatively benign reality with the moral panic and disproportionate defensiveness taken up by the dominant group. It is in the same latent way that dog whistle terms have been used to castigate marginalized groups by politicians and journalists for decades.

ECA was used by Lemke and Chala (2016) to show how Senegal’s and Ethiopia’s journalists used social media (Twitter) to interact with readers. Of particular note in these authors’ work is the importance of digital context. Different news outlets use the digital frames

32 around their content in varying ways and to varying ends. These uses of digital content are intentionally deployed to direct the reader toward certain underlying priorities that can be observed by researchers. For example, the authors showed that some outlets would avoid live tweeting an event, as that drives traffic only to the tweets themselves. Instead, journalists would tweet links to articles on their website – driving traffic to the website and away from the social interactivity of Twitter. To extrapolate, this is to say that when I am looking at articles on the

Fox News website, it is important to observe the digital frames – the design of the article, the multimedia content, the links, and the interactivity – in order to take in the additional context and priorities that are being expressed by the site’s designers and owners.

Stock (2007) uses ECA to illustrate the power that media editors have in the creation of pervasive and hurtful social myths. Searching the term “anarchy” alongside news of Hurricane

Katrina, Stock found that the term anarchy was misused to convey other intended meanings

(colloquial meanings of anarchy, anarchy as chaos and lawlessness), but also to construct harmful mythical narratives about the disaster survivors, such as to describe war zone imagery of looting, violence, and social breakdown. These myths pervaded U.S. national coverage of the event and likely impacted the way in which the disaster was handled by government responders and political leaders. Stock’s research undergirds the importance of ECA as a tool illuminating the connection between media’s chosen frames and the resulting political/public perception, response, or lack of response. These media frames and media myths have the power to construct a social idea of reality that can cause harm and misunderstanding.

Finally, Altheide and Grimes (2005) use ECA to argue that media organizations were key in uncritically perpetuating the G.W. Bush Administration’s incorrect myths about Saddam

Hussein and Iraq in order to push forward with the Iraq war. They label this concerted series of

33 events a “War Program, or a sequence of reports that blends imagery and language of the current conflict with previous wars, and incorporates critiques of war policy within the news frame about movement toward war” (Altheide and Grimes, 2005: 618). On page 620 they go on to say,

“especially network TV news organizations, chose not to present important contextual and background information about the Middle East, and especially Iraq, because it was not consistent with other news themes nor was it as entertaining.” They argue that media tends to uncritically accept the narratives and frames put forward by certain highly influential bodies (think tanks, political entities), based mostly in the availability of popular narratives alongside entertaining themes. These authors urge others using this methodology to look for overarching ‘programs’ such as the war program to help identify and explain contemporary propaganda campaigns and the related media logic.

Beyond common manifestations of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, the overarching propaganda narrative set forth by conservative media organizations, such as Fox News, seems to reach for such a ‘program’ as defined by Altheide and Grimes (2005). General cultural evidence points to the colloquial conclusion that there is some concerted effort to frame transgender and gender-binary-non-conforming individuals as the sometimes-conflicting notions that they are a danger to themselves and others, a drain on U.S. resources (such as military budgets), and victims of their own self-generated confusion. As discussed in Chapters I-II, all three of these notions are unsubstantiated and rely on the uncritical audience as well as the uncritical journalist to succeed. Indeed, throughout coding I will be looking for such links to think tanks and dominant political logic in order to establish or verify theoretical claims that certain organizations have influenced and pressed these positions. Altheide and Grimes (2005) state that news organizations accept these types of ‘program’ positions and simultaneously subvert or

34 ignore alternative explanations and themes. Certainly, the notions that transgender people are bathroom voyeurs and predators or that transgender people are bankrupting the U.S. military are both ‘man bites dog’ stories that serve very specific overarching framing stories. In the hypothetical context of a yet-to-be-found Anti-Transgender Program, these would fit very well into the categories of being consistent with previously held (transphobic) public views on the transgender identity, alongside providing a moral-panic-driven form of entertainment – very similar to the threat of ‘terrorism’ within the War Program.

Data Collection

As shown in Chapter II, I came to the topic of cisgender fragility through reviewing the

CDA queer studies literature on types of conservative rhetoric and their connections with reinforcing power structures through various discursive techniques, e.g. dog whistle terminology.

The theoretical idea of White Fragility, an explanatory concept found in the study of the social construction of race, showed a resemblance to these discursive techniques. Seeing that connection, my goal then was to design a small-scale exploratory study to test if these common themes presented in the evaluation of a definitive mainstream conservative news network. The obvious choice was to observe Fox News, as they are widely viewed as a mainstream source of news for the broad base of U.S. conservatives. As described earlier in this current chapter, ECA was identified as the ideal choice to take up such a study. Of particular interest is the way in which Fox News constructs the idea and archetype of “transgender” – especially as it translates to their perceptions of how these persons should have access to services, civil rights, and how the public should respond to the perceived dangers presented by those who identify as transgender in the U.S. Thus, my unit of analysis will be each chosen article, as noted below in the sampling

35 section, with the full inclusion of all surrounding non-advertising visual content in the archived page. Thus, not only will the article text/photos be observed and coded, but also attention will be paid to the non-sponsored article links that relate to the transgender social discussion. Upon preliminary observation, this would often include the device of large highlighted text, pop-up videos from broadcast interviews/reports, and upon rare occasion, a relevant article link. Non- relevant article links, videos, and advertisements will be ignored.

The exploratory questions under consideration in this research were: why are transgender and gender non-conforming persons often castigated in the U.S. public and political discourse under the banner of public safety? What role does moral-conservative and neoliberal market conformity play in this formulation of rhetoric? How has the rise of populist rhetoric contributed to the public’s view of transgender persons and their citizenship? Why do we see the advancement of so-called “transgender bathroom bills,” the framing of transgender soldiers as an expensive, burdensome group, as well as other political moves that seek to cast transgender and gender non-conforming persons as threats to public systems such as the military, education, housing, and sports? These questions will be translated into coding themes as outlined below in the “Themes from the literature” section. Motifs and elements, as well as my open coding categories, will also be outlined in the “Procedure” section.

Sampling

Because news coverage on any one issue tends to ebb and flow, and this cycle is often consistent with waves of political interest, or particular socio-political events that reinvigorate the discourse, sampling is best carried out on a basis of seeking content in clusters contingent on these cycles. This is advantageous, as atheoretical statistical samples would miss these clusters

(Altheide, 1987). This is why I chose to embrace a cluster sampling approach, aiming toward the combination of theoretical and saturation sampling. Contemporary internet search engines enhance this ability, as one can search for key terms, such as in my case, “transgender,” and see these clustered cycles and events.

I designed my search using the FoxNews.com homepage search engine. My search term was “transgender.” Given the options in the website’s advanced search tools, I made the following limitations to the search:

 Limited my search to the first year of the Donald J. Trump presidency, January 20th, 2017

through January 20th, 2018.

 Limited my search to the “Fox News” category (excluded their auxiliary Business and

Latino sites),

 Limited it to “stories” (excluding video, slideshows, lists, and recipes),

 Limited story selection to only include stories pertaining to the United States. The last of

these tasks required manual sorting based on the tags used on each article by the website

manager, and visual inspection of the article.

The total population of articles in the search was 919. Upon visual inspection, this search contained multiple duplicate articles (same article posted in different areas of the website but with identical content), and numerous articles not authored by Fox News. Fox News authors

37 relatively few articles that fit this criteria, in fact. Using manual sorting for U.S.-related articles containing sufficient content to be coded for this research, and authored by Fox News (or

FoxSports) rather than articles reposted from wire services (such as the Associated Press) or solely authored/reposted by other websites, the population of relevant articles was 125.

Theoretical saturation was being achieved after coding around 20 articles. This process started by going in chronological order (oldest to newest) from the population of articles for the first 15 articles. From this point, I switched to cluster sampling to see how the themes and frames changed, if at all, over time within the same topic cluster, and examined new clusters that appeared later. At least 2-3 additional articles were evaluated and coded from each cluster for confirmation of continued saturation, and inclusion of any new themes, frames, or motifs/elements. Saturation was measured as seeing the same themes, motifs/elements, and content presentation repeatedly with no novel additions.

All 125 articles in the population were carefully read. Around 15 articles were coded in- depth at the themes and motifs/elements (discourse) level using the cover sheet plus detained in- line notes. An additional 37 articles were coded using the coding sheet with occasional in-line notations. A total of 52 articles were coded from the population of 125 articles. These coding clusters include President Trump’s decision to rescind Title IX protections based on gender identity for students and athletics, coverage of the so-called ‘bathroom bills’ in North Carolina,

Texas, and elsewhere, the decision by the Boy Scouts of America to include transgender boys in scouting programs, and the clemency granted to Chelsea Manning by President Obama, the soldier who leaked classified documents to the public via WikiLeaks and later while in prison identified publicly as transgender and began her medical transition. Chelsea Manning seemed to be an ongoing person of interest, as Fox continued to cover her life throughout the year,

38 including her appointment as a guest lecturer at Harvard, and whether or not the Pentagon was to financially cover her medical transition. The last cluster was President Trump’s decision to ban transgender troops in the U.S. Military.

Sorting the search results, reading, evaluating the authorship, and printing the relevant articles in the population took around 700 minutes. Coding each article took from 10 to 30 minutes. Initial coding took around 450 minutes to code, analyze, and compare on the initial pass, and then additional iterative re-evaluation, identification of clusters, recoding of earlier articles, and saturation confirmation took at least another 700 minutes. Total time spent gathering and coding data was around 1850 minutes, conservatively.

Procedure

Using Altheide’s (1987, 1996) example, I began viewing the articles on the website in a chronological order and worked toward creating a topical guide. I would view a few articles, assess the messaging and categories that each would fit into, and then revisit my previous materials to see if modifications were necessary.

As part of the reflexive process in ECA, I maintained ethnographic journaling throughout the coding and analysis. This process kept track of the search terms, their total results, and provided additional qualitative data helpful in reframing the research questions as I proceeded.

Journaling was recorded in a combination of typed notes using windows notepad, handwritten notes on post-it notes, coding cover sheets, and in-line notes in the margins of printed articles.

Where needed, I used the Google search engine to keep track of basic facts about certain events, incidents, or pieces of legislation (dates, locations, etc.).

I used themes, frames, and discourse as levels to evaluate the content. Explaining these coding and analysis levels, Gormly (2004: 223) writes:

Themes are the recurring typical theses that run through multiple reports. Frames are the focus—a parameter or boundary—for discussing a particular event. Frames focus the reader of the text on what will be discussed, how it will be discussed, and how it will not be discussed; themes comprise the treatment of the topics as well as the topics themselves. Finally, discourse is the actual symbolic interchange, the words and images used to communicate the themes. Discourse conveys the themes that exist in a given frame or set of frames.

Thus, I adopted these levels of coding and analysis in my ECA evaluation of cisgender fragility. Gormly also deploys the use of “motifs,” which are descriptively similar to the discursive practices identified by CDA (Van Dijk, 1992). These motifs are the elements of discourse manifest within each of these coding and analysis categories. Each article reviewed presented a number of areas of interest, depending on the choices of the article’s author and the website’s design and implementation. Areas of interest could include (but are not limited to) the article properties of: article title, article body, accompanying photo or video, photo or video caption, the article’s categorization on the website, and non-advertising recommended or linked content. The review of linked content will be limited to the transgender discussion, but other patterns may be observed.

Giving attention to the interactivity of the web page content is important to taking in digital content. Unlike print journalism, digital content is hyperlinked (connected to other stories), enmeshed with multimedia (how the story is presented is variable and adaptable based on available media and how it can best be seen as impacting the reader), and interactive (readers can respond through comments, likes, shares, etc.) (Dueze, 1998; Lemke & Chala, 2016). Taken together, all of these components – the themes, frames, and discourse, alongside the digital

40 environment -- can situate the article under review within the context of both the host website itself, but also the cultural and historical themes, frames, and discourse.

The codebook (and coding cover sheet) for this research, therefore, begins with the themes, motifs, and elements listed below. Open iterative coding categories will take note of the presentation of the digital frames described above per Lemke and Chala, seek "programs"

(propaganda narratives; references to think tanks, research institutes, etc.) per Altheide and

Grimes, and continuously search for other preconceived themes, good descriptive information, and emerging or unexpected devices per Altheide.

Themes From the Literature

 Transgender people as threats to the public and/or private safety of individuals.

 Transgender people as threats to public systems, e.g. the military, education, housing,

sports, economics.

 Transgender persons as outside moral conformity.

 Transgender persons as outside market conformity.

Motifs and Elements From the Literature

Diangelo, 2011; Marzullo, 2011; Peterson, 2011; Peck, 2014; Westbrook and Schilt, 2014) to provide the basis for the conservative worldview toward transgender and gender non-conforming persons.

 Transgender perversion and the potential for violence in all transgender persons: The moral-

conservative notion that being transgender is inherently perverse and an affront to

creation/God. Sexual perversion is particularly repulsive and abnormal, and many

conservative Christians believe that sexual perversion is a more serious type of sin than

others. This type of perversion requires upstanding persons to be on guard (self-defense

claim), since it contains within it the potential for violence. In this paradigm, sexual

perversions of one type are often linked to sexual perversions of another type, e.g. an

adherent may argue that a transgender person is also likely a rapist, pedophile, or practitioner

of bestiality.

 Self defense claim by cisgender person/group: When transgender persons are labeled

dangerous, this provokes cisgender people to take the defensive posture. Self-defense claims

can be accompanied by a reversal of the real direction of danger – claims which assert that

transgender people are dangerous, when in fact most violence between these groups is

cisgender violence against transgender persons.

 Cisgender discomfort: Discomfort at the mention of transgender persons or related social

issues.

 Folk hero narrative: Cisgender person or group as the protector against the violent

transgender threat.

 Realism: Using arguments of realism to argue away humanitarianism – e.g. castigating

‘bleeding-heart’ liberals and other allies of transgender persons, labeling of activists as

destructive to social fabric or morals. This is often seen alongside folk hero narratives.

 Determining gender: The inability for a cisgender person to clearly identify (or

acknowledge) the gender of a transgender or gender non-conforming person causes

discomfort and defensive moves to uphold the gender binary.

 Autonomy: Part of neoliberal market ideology, autonomy is used by business conservatives

as a means to suggest that conformity to market norms is the way that transgender people

may be afforded human rights and/or citizenship.

 Individualism: Part of neoliberal market ideology, individualism is used as an argument to

ignore social and historical circumstances that create and sustain inequalities.

 Responsibility: Part of neoliberal market ideology, personal responsibility comes alongside

individualism and autonomy to reify a bootstrap narrative and is used by business

conservatives to erase systemic inequalities and systems of domination. Individuals are

blamed for their own circumstances, or are successful only because of their own full

participation in the meritocracy.

 Fox as protector/advocate: Fox News as the protector and advocate of traditional moral-

economic principles.

 Fox as victim advocate: Fox News as the protector of victims.

 Fox decides victims/villains: Fox News casts cisgender persons as victims and transgender

person as villains. Framing transgender persons as villains caters to the populist discourse,

and states the transgender people are the enemy of the producing class (a contrived “class” of

people that urges a class-blind form of “solidarity” between workers, middle, and upper

class, but excludes the “takers”).

 Civil/business dog whistle: A civil or business frame being deployed as a dog whistle stand

in for otherwise overtly bigoted anti-transgender ideas or policies, e.g. conservative

arguments that transgender people are a source of social or market instability, or exorbitant

costs to taxpayers/public.

 Religious dog whistle: A religious frame being deployed as a dog whistle stand in for

otherwise overtly bigoted anti-transgender ideas or policies,e.g. Transgender persons as

undeserving of the rights of other citizens due to perversion, transgender persons as a direct

threat to families, heteronormative nuclear families as the victims of transgender persons, use

of moral degeneracy argument as substitute for social explanations (such as ignoring

inequalities and oppressive systems and instead suggesting that transgender suffering is the

result of their immoral choices and resulting consequences).

 Mocking legitimacy: Conservative person or group casts transgender and gender non-

conforming persons as an illegitimate or undeserving group by using diminutive or

dismissive language, or through use of quotation marks (as a form of sarcasm, in place of

saying “so-called”).

Chapter IV offers a summary of the key findings of this preliminary exploration. Further,

Chapter IV draws conclusions regarding how the findings compare to the theoretical literature found in Chapter II, makes recommendations for future research, and describes the limitations of this study.

CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS

Those on the side of human rights and equal protection under the law can benefit from well-considered theory and analysis of qualitative aspects of the positions held by their opponents, who often come from dominant and privileged social positions. The public opinion literature also shows that the discussion and adoption of legislation and/or court decisions in favor of LGBTQIA human rights, such as same-sex marriage, have a positive effect on public attitudes toward persons with LGBTQIA identities (Becker, 2014; Kreitzer, Hamilton, &

Tolbert, 2014). This reinforces the need to deploy sound social science analysis in arenas of politics and lobbying to enact social change in favor of LGBTQIA rights and recognition.

This findings and conclusions section will begin by presenting the numerical totals of the findings, followed by exploring the themes one by one. Next, a discussion of the motifs and elements will be included, alongside the introduction of new motifs and elements that were emergent during coding. Then, conclusions and additional discussion will be offered with an eye toward synthesis of the findings and suggestions for future research on this topic. Last, this chapter will explore the challenges and limitations, researcher bias, validity, and reliability in this study.

The themes identified in the theoretical literature were as follows:

 Transgender people as threats to the public and/or private safety of individuals.

 Transgender people as threats to public systems. E.g. the military, education, housing,

sports, economics.

 Transgender persons as outside moral conformity.

 Transgender persons as outside market conformity.

Total Frequency of Themes Identified

Transgender people as threats to the public/private 24 safety of individuals

Transgender persons as outside moral conformity 26

Transgender persons as outside market conformity 28

Transgender people as threats to public systems 42

Total articles in sample: 52

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

Figure 1: Total frequency of themes identified

As seen in Figure 1, the most common theme identified was Transgender people as threats to public systems, with 42 of the 52 articles containing this theme. This was followed by

Transgender persons as outside market conformity in 28 of 52 articles, Transgender persons as outside moral conformity in 26 of 52 articles, and Transgender people as threats to public/private safety of individuals as a theme identified in 24 of the 52 sampled articles. These themes are not mutually exclusive, and so it was common to find multiple themes while coding an article.

Looking at these themes one by one offers insight into the substance of how they were manifest in the articles I coded.

Theme: Transgender people as threats to the public and/or private safety of individuals

This theme was contextually common in the articles I coded. The discussion of so-called transgender bathroom bills – the anti-transgender legislation put forth by a number of U.S. states,

46 but, most notably and sensationally, North Carolina, which required that all persons use the gendered bathroom and/or locker room that matched the sex on the person’s birth certificate – was a regular forum for this theme. During the sampling window, North Carolina was dealing with the aftermath of having passed their version of this law (including its eventual partial repeal), and other states were in the midst of considering such bills, notably Texas. The other most common reference to this came in articles related to the Boy Scouts of America allowing boys who are transgender to participate.

The most common use of this theme came in the form of some version of the folk hero notion that lawmakers must protect women and children.

What was interesting about the deployment of this theme was that the notion of protection of “our” women and children was often notably bereft of the overt mention of a perpetrator. If a perpetrator was mentioned, it would be men, with the implication that transgender persons were men in women’s clothing. Take this exemplary quote from Phil Berger

– the president of the state senate of North Carolina – who made this statement, cited in an opinion piece by John Moody on 2/16/17 entitled, “Basketball or bathrooms: The Tar Heel state is stuck”:

The vast majority of people in North Carolina don’t believe that women and girls should have to share restrooms and locker rooms with people who clearly are men.

A similar appeal was made by those rallied by the Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan

Patrick, described by FoxSports as “popular with social conservatives who drive Texas politics.”

The article, entitled “Texas bathroom bill may pose big test for sports leagues,” published on

2/3/17, cited that Patrick’s followers’ rallied under the “No men in women’s bathroom”

47 campaign. These types of overtly transphobic quotes were found more brazenly in opinion pieces by Fox News pundits but were not as common in stories that were published as news articles.

In regular political news articles, such as when a representative was being interviewed for a news article, the politician would simply insert this so-called need for protection into the discussion, adjacent the discussion of the bill, law, or proposal itself. It was not a common strategy for the news article authors to include direct accusations that transgender people were potentially the perpetrators of violence. News articles were far more likely to use the second theme, which was to frame persons who are transgender as being a threat to public systems.

That said, it is important to note the role of opinion pieces on the Fox News website.

Whenever there were major events related to transgender political and social concerns, the Fox

News website does not seem to make it a habit to extensively cover these events with their own staff writers. Instead, they repost articles from the Associated Press and other news wire services, and then have various staff writers write opinion pieces (labeled clearly as “opinion”) which reflect the positions of moral conservative and business conservative readers. These opinion articles form or reform the rhetoric that is used elsewhere. The reform angle is particularly notable. While regular news articles avoid overt transphobic statements (often to the extent of treating the discussion of these laws and court decisions as mere political disagreements – see the section on the new motif of “political territory”), the opinion pieces do not hesitate to deploy tropes and accusations. They also take additional steps to connect the dog whistles to these plain language statements. First, these authors say the dog whistle statement, followed closely by what they really mean. Second, these opinion articles often contain links to other articles and organizations in line with the paragraphs of the article. These links are carefully chosen to be relevant to the author’s content. It was common to see an opinion piece discussing the

48 transgender bathroom bills -- in an overtly transphobic way, or in a way that set up a clear reversal of danger argument -- contain links inline to other non-opinion news articles where the more subtle dog whistles were deployed.

Another example of this rhetoric formation/linking formula comes vividly in an article published on 1/13/17 by Todd Starnes, a radio talk show host for Fox News. This article was entitled, “It’s time for churches to sever ties with the Boy Scouts.” This article came in the wake of the decision made by the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to allow boys who are transgender to participate in Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts – or, as Starnes transphobically describes these children, “girls who identify as boys” (an example of the motif of mocking the legitimacy of persons who are transgender). He quotes the Family Research Council president Tony Perkins as calling this “sexual anarchy” (an example of the motif of transgender perversion and the potential for violence in all transgender persons). He states that this move by the BSA was driven by “militant social justice warriors,” and later implies that the BSA is likely to allows boys and girls to shower together, use the same dressing rooms, and cause “further youth protection problems.” Starnes offers his readers an alternative organization to patronize – Trail Life USA

(the folk hero in this narrative) – whose tenets are extolled as being “committed to biblical traditional values affirmed in [their] statement of faith and values” (which in this context is exemplary of the religious dog whistle motif). Starnes repeatedly quotes the chairman of this organization, John Sternberger, who warns that this move by the BSA will confuse boys and impair their psychological development. Sternberger argues that the BSA is no longer protecting people’s children and ceding their ethics and morals to “political activists” (realism motif, self- defense motif). He appeals to “common sense best practices for child protection,” which presumably include transphobic and homophobic policies which are core to Trail Life USA’s

49 alternative model. Starnes finishes the article by quipping, “Besides, how can the Boy Scouts of

America teach ethics and morals when its adult leaders can’t muster the courage to stand morally straight in the face of militant gender revolutionaries?” Amidst these paragraphs are multiple reference links to Starnes’ own book and links to Trail Life USA’s website.

This technique of using opinion pieces to form, reform, and define the rhetorical meaning behind the latent and dog whistle terms more common in news pieces is deployed regularly in examples from all four of the themes I had identified in the literature. It is unclear to this researcher whether this should be its own theme, or rather seen as a strategy that augments the other themes. Further research may certainly build a better case for the role this strategy holds.

Theme: Transgender people as threats to public systems

This theme was the most common overall in the Fox News website articles, where most of the articles authored by Fox News included this theme in some fashion. When articles raised the issue of the transgender bathroom bills, the given state (or the state’s economy), such as

North Carolina or Texas, was seen as threatened. For example, when President Donald Trump was interviewed by Sean Hannity during an April 2016 interview, he stated:

I love North Carolina, and they have a law, and it’s a law that, you know, unfortunately is causing them some problems. -- 2/22/17 – “Trump administration working on new transgender bathroom directive,” Ryan Gados, Fox News

In the article, “Church sponsored Boy Scout Troops won’t be forced into transgender membership policy” published 2/10/17 and authored by Fox News and ChristianPost.com, the opening sentence reads:

Boy Scout troops sponsored by Catholic churches won’t be required to adhere to the organizations new policy of allowing girls who identify as boys to become troop members.

Not only is this sentence an excellent example of the motifs of mocking legitimacy and religious dog whistle, but it shows how a broad claim in the title of the article acts as clickbait for a larger moral conservative target demographic (“church-sponsored”), and then immediately gets narrowed to only talking about Catholic churches. Further, they use the word “forced” in the title, even though no force was threatened. The article goes on to make a number of self-defense claims using transphobic phrases and latently implies that transgender youth are a threat to not only scouting programs, but the church itself. All of this is amidst an article whose manifest content is to inform readers that the BSA is not requiring the Catholic church to conform to their new inclusive policies.

Prior to leaving office, President Barack Obama had granted clemency to Chelsea

Manning, a former intelligence officer who had leaked classified documents to the public via

WikiLeaks. Fox News seemed particularly interested in this story and its ongoing process as

Manning was released during May 2017. In each article, Manning’s transgender status becomes the focus, particularly the theme of whether Manning would be allowed to use her military serviceperson insurance to continue her medical transition. Manning’s lawyer made public statements such as this one on 5/17/17 in an article titled “Chelsea Manning freed from Kansas military prison” by Fox News:

Because of the nature of her circumstances and the experience of confinement, she is very committed to living her life as free from the government as possible and taking care of her own health benefits and financial needs…

Nevertheless, many articles, including the one above, questioned whether taxpayers would “foot the bill for gender reassignment.” Only two days prior, on May 15, 2017, one such

Fox headline read, “Chelsea Manning to remain in Army, receive health care benefits after

51 prison release.” These articles also regularly dead named Manning (used the name she was assigned at birth), and quoted Republican lawmakers expressing great disdain for Manning.

These articles mock the legitimacy of Manning’s identity as a transgender person, and cast her as a villain – focusing on her identity as a criminal transgender woman, potentially using taxpayer resources to transition, as part of the reason for that villain label. Manning is seen by Fox News authors as a threat to both the military and the economy based on her identity as a transgender person.

This theme was also evident in the cluster of articles relating to President Trump’s executive decision to ban transgender troops from serving in the military. By June, 2017 the

Trump administration, via Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, was already showing evidence that they had plans to block transgender enlistment and service – as evidenced by the article title from

June 30, 2017 by Fox News, “Pentagon delays enlistment of transgender recruits.” By this point, transgender people had been openly serving in the military since 2016.

Less than a month later, President Trump “issued a ban on transgender people serving in the military” via a series of three early morning tweets, as documented by the first Fox News authored article on the subject. This article is of particular note, since it is a prime example of the motif of mocking legitimacy, which is demonstrated here through Fox New’s response strategy.

Fox News chose to allow Associated Press articles explain the mundane details of the tweet- based ban, and instead its first news article, written by Diana Falzone on July 26, 2017 entitled,

“Trump bans transgender military members; celebrities react,” delivers on its title promise. The article consists of a series of random snarky tweets from celebrities ranging George Takei, to

Mia Farrow, Seth Rogan, James Corden, and others, ending with a quote from a statement

52 condemning Trump’s decision made in a press statement by GLAAD (formerly known as the

Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).

Similarly, the very next article in the population, published on the same date by author

Chris Ciaccia, is entitled, “Trump’s transgender military ban slammed by tech execs.” It was not until much later in the day that Fox News released articles which spoke to the substance of the

Presidential ban, and covered the White House press conference on the issue, hosted by Sarah

Huckabee Sanders (see “White House defends reversal of ‘Obama policy’ on transgender military service” by Brooke Singman, and “ACLU vows lawsuit against President Trump’s transgender policy for military” by William Mears). It was not until the next day that Fox News included feedback from military sources (see “Defense Department to Trump on transgender ban: Not so fast” by Barnini Chakraborty on July 27, 2017). This strategy of making light of a major Executive policy decision by relegating it to the realm of mere entertainment -- minutia of snarky celebrity response tweets and the opinions of tech executives -- seems to display a latent disregard for the gravity of the Presidential tweets and the human effects that they have.

However, the tweets themselves intend the same latent effect of mocking legitimacy, relegating a major military policy decision to a series of three brief tweets wherein the President blames transgender people, and says that “our military… cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.” See the tweets in full via the screen capture in Figure 2 (source: Twitter).

Figure 2: Trump tweets, banning transgender participation in military

Theme: Transgender persons as outside moral conformity

This theme was often linked to religious appeals, as could be expected from the theoretical literature (Marzullo, 2011; Peterson, 2011; Peck, 2014). Examples abound in the articles surrounding the Boy Scouts of America opening their programs to boys who are transgender. Some examples are found in the transgender bathroom bill articles, but most often limited to the opinion pieces, or to quotes in news articles from conservative politicians. A few examples were found related to the morality of Chelsea Manning, which is where I will start.

One of the first articles I coded was 1/26/17, “Trump rips ungrateful Chelsea Manning after Obama criticism” by Fox News. In this article, it opens with the sentence, “President Trump

54 ripped leaker Chelsea Manning as an ‘ungrateful TRAITOR’…” Trump becomes Fox News’ folk hero as the article explains that Manning had publicly written that she was concerned for queer and trans people after the election of Trump and criticized President Obama for compromising during his terms in office. The article sets up a moral argument for how Manning is a “leaker”, a “traitor”, “ungrateful”, and “troubling.” This article also demonstrated early on that Fox News authors use the strategy of using quotations from authority figures in order to say the unpopular things that the article authors themselves would prefer not to say – such as blatantly transphobic statements, or criticisms. Context, however, often belies that the author of the article agrees with these statements and is using the quotes to advance the story in a way which can be derived from analysis of latent content.

Another example of how article titles are used to convey a message different from the article content, demonizing transgender persons, is the article from 4/14/17 titled “Transgender immigrant sentenced in Texas for illegal reentry” by Ray Bogan, Fox News. The article itself explains that Gonzalez, a person arrested, detained, and sentenced by the federal courts for entering the U.S. from Mexico illegally, was facing deportation. The article has nothing to do with her status as a transgender person, yet this identifier is the first word in the title of the article, seemingly the most important descriptor for this “illegal immigrant,” as the web category header for this article denotes. It seems clear that to this author, Gonzalez’s status as a transgender person further contributes to her lack of morality as a criminal.

I choose to highlight these examples, in addition to the highlights in earlier sections related to morality claims surrounding bathroom bills and BSA policy changes, in order to show how morality claims are often intersectionally linked by Fox News authors to other pejorative identifiers. So, in the case of both Manning and Gonzalez, they are criminal not just because of

55 their unlawful acts and subsequent convictions, but also they are outside moral conformity by identifying as transgender – which becomes a further excuse to mock the legitimacy of their identity, bolsters the claims that there is perversion and violence in transgender persons, and justifies the label of villain.

Theme: Transgender persons as outside market conformity

Transgender bathroom bills are often the prime example during the sampling window of the theme of placing transgender persons as outside market conformity. This theme most often manifested itself by what was left unsaid in articles more than what was written. By this, I mean that nearly every Fox News ‘news’ article written about the topic of North Carolina’s HB2, and other similar pieces of state level legislation, was framed in a way that centered the state, or the sports league, under the (often unspoken) specter of transgender persons and their allies -- looming over these economies and organizations, potentially wreaking havoc on their economies, tourism, and eligibility for hosting sporting events.

These bathroom bill laws limit “LGBT non-discrimination protections and requires transgender people to use public restrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate,” according to the 3/30/17 article by Fox News entitled “North Carolina lawmakers announce plan to repeal ‘bathroom bill’.” Notably absent from this entire article is the mention of transgender persons beyond the above quote. The article talks at length about the decision of the NBA to relocate its All-Star game. It mentions an estimated cost of $3.76 billion dollars to business in the state. It mentions the difficulty that lawmakers in the state had to undergo to realize their error and work out an appeal. It does not mention the harm done by this law to transgender persons, or the human rights considerations. It does not mention the history of these types of exclusive and

56 bigoted laws and how they have been used to control and exclude minority groups since the inception of the state (North Carolina and elsewhere).

What seems important to the author of the above cited article, and many like it in the cluster, is the political consequences and economic costs seemingly inflicted on these states by transgender persons and their allies.

When the NBA moved its All-Star game to New Orleans, FoxSports authored an article on 2/14/17 titled, “NBA All-Star game spotlights LGBT oasis in the South.” In this article, both

New Orleans and the NBA take center stage as the protectors and includers of LGB, and especially transgender persons. The article is full of neoliberal autonomy claims that paint the inclusion of transgender persons – including allowing access to the bathroom of their choice – as the pro-equality, pro-business thing to do. The article’s author downplays past police raids and oppression of LGBT persons in New Orleans as mere “challenges” and paints them as far in the city’s past – despite the severity of the one cited example, which was when 32 people were killed in a 1973 arson at a club. For this FoxSports author, transgender people are valuable to some states, cities, and corporations because prestige and profits can be gained when those municipalities and corporations appear inclusive to transgender persons. Little consideration in these instances is given to the effects this type of leveraging has on the transgender persons involved – such as persons who are transgender already living in New Orleans, or the actual lived experience of transgender or gender non-conforming people who might travel to New

Orleans for the All-Star game.

As explained in the theory chapter (Brown, 2005; Foucault, 2008; Marzullo, 2011;

Peterson, 2011; Peck, 2014), articles like this downplay the history of oppression in favor of an a-historical back patting for the area’s current progressive viewpoints. In this way, (presumably

57 wealthy) transgender persons are invited to engage in tourism, travel to see a sports event, spend, and consume -- and pat the NBA and New Orleans on the back for welcoming them without questioning the wider social or historical circumstances. One can speculate that it would still be unwelcome in this environment for a person who is transgender to question whether past transgender-rights activists, often harmed or killed, were being honored in the NBA’s ceremonies, or if mention would be made of past oppressions and crimes against the humanity of transgender persons. Such acts could be labeled as resistance to market conformity, and result in social sanctions to the individual for threatening the autonomy claims made by those in power.

What is deemed as market-conforming behavior for transgender persons seems to still be up for debate. In an article published 3/20/17 titled “Restaurant’s transgender bathroom sign garners support, angers others” by Fox News, the author explains how the owner of an

Oklahoma City restaurant posted a threatening bathroom sign that read, “We do not have a transgender bathroom. So, don’t be caught in the wrong one.” The owner of this business says that transgender guests are welcome “if they were dressed appropriately,” although the author notes that the owner was not willing to clarify what he meant by that.

Similarly, when an article entitled “Transgender boy wins high school girls’ wrestling tournament” by Fox News on 2/27/17 highlights a transgender boy who, while preferring to wrestle boys, was forced by a Texas state board to wrestle based on the gender on his birth certificate. As the title of the article states, he won the state tournament – undefeated -- and young women wrestlers in the tournament felt unfairly treated. At the time of the publication, lawsuits were being filed by parents trying to ban the student from competing.

All of the above was situated amidst the Trump administration revoking Obama-era guidelines to include transgender students (gender identity) under Title IX protection from sex

58 discrimination. In the 2/22/17 article by Fox News, “Trump to revoke Obama-era transgender bathroom guidance for schools, source says,” the author explains that the Trump administration frames gender identity protections as a states’ rights issue, and insists that it should not be decided or enforced at the federal level. Trump, who made campaign promises to support the

LGBT community, upset well known transgender and ally supporters, including Olympian

Caitlyn Jenner and Trump’s pick to sing the national anthem at his inauguration, Jackie Evancho

-- who has a sister who is transgender. These criticisms were elaborated in a Fox News authored article on 2/24/17 called, “Caitlyn Jenner slams Trump over transgender bathroom stance;

President could meet with Jackie Evancho.”

In addition to the articles in a previous theme that highlighted the Presidential ban on transgender persons’ service in the military, these last four articles have been highlighted as they demonstrate the confusing social environment and mixed messages that are lobbed at transgender and gender non-conforming persons in contemporary market society. While on one hand, some businesses, municipalities, and nationwide sports organizations go out of their way to include access and participation for transgender persons in the marketplace, it is still commonplace for threats to persist, institutional policies to present no-win situations, and even for the self- described business-savvy POTUS to indicate a lack of support by withdrawing legal protections under the law based on gender identity – both in removing Title IX protections, and in castigating transgender servicemembers as costly and disruptive. In neoliberal business terms, especially for business conservatives, persons who are transgender seem often cast as a thorn in the side of the system – presenting legal and economic challenges that are costly, laborious, and fraught with reputational pitfalls for the ownership and political classes. When transgender people are highlighted in relationship to the marketplace, my findings show in a preliminary way

59 that Fox News does not find them to be contributors to society, rather obstacles to the free movement of money and power.

Motifs and Elements

Within the four research areas of inquiry posed in the introduction, and simplified above as themes, were a number of motifs and elements to be sought based on the theoretical research on cisgender fragility. These motifs and elements often combine to form what Gormly (2004) called frames. Frames show us the message(s) that the authors of the article intend to frame the arguments. They use the individual motifs and elements at the discourse level to focus the attention of the reader. It was my experience in this research that Fox News website authors used a assortment of these motifs/elements in each article to set a tone, the frame. The frame was often pointing toward one of the themes I have identified, but also at times seeks to highlight one of the motifs/elements as being its own prominent theme. Thus, I have found that motifs and elements can also be the framing story used by the author to focus the reader’s attention. They are interchangeable based on context.

Figure 3 illustrates the total count findings for each motif/element across all sampled articles. Figures 4-7 illustrate how these motifs and elements fit into each theme visited in the previous section. One can see that the most common motifs vary a bit based on theme, yet, overall, realism, self-defense claims by cisgender persons, mocking legitimacy, and civil/business dog whistles tend to be most commonly found in all themes and across more than half of the sampled articles. While these quantitative representations can only speak to this dataset, and offer no generalizable statistical usefulness, it is still notable to this researcher how

60 common and engrained some of these techniques are in the day to day output of Fox News, across authors, time, and topic.

Total Frequency of Motifs and Elements Identified

Fox as protector/advocate 8 Fox as victim advocate 10 Determining gender 13 Individualism 19 Religious/moral dog whistle 20 Autonomy 22 Responsibility 23 Cisgender discomfort 23 Transgender perversion / violence 24 Political territory (emergent) 27 Folk hero narrative 30 Fox decides victims/villains 31 Mocking legitimacy 37 Civil/business dog whistle 38 Self-defense claim by cisgender person/group 38 Realism 45 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50

Figure 3: Total frequency of motifs and elements identified

Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender people as threats to the public/private safety of individuals

Fox as protector/advocate 5 Determining gender 6 Fox as victim advocate 7 Religious/moral dog whistle 11 Individualism 13 Autonomy 13 Cisgender discomfort 13 Political territory (emergent) 14 Fox decides victims/villains 16 Responsibility 16 Folk hero narrative 16 Transgender perversion / violence 18 Mocking legitimacy 20 Self-defense claim by cisgender person/group 20 Civil/business dog whistle 21 Realism 23 0 5 10 15 20 25

Figure 4: Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender people as threats to the public/private safety of individuals

Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender people as threats to public systems

Fox as protector/advocate 7 Fox as victim advocate 9 Determining gender 10 Religious/moral dog whistle 16 Individualism 16 Autonomy 18 Responsibility 19 Transgender perversion / violence 19 Cisgender discomfort 21 Political territory (emergent) 22 Fox decides victims/villains 22 Folk hero narrative 26 Mocking legitimacy 30 Self-defense claim by cisgender person/group 31 Civil/business dog whistle 33 Realism 35 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35

Figure 5: Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender people as threats to public systems 61

Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender persons as outside moral conformity

Fox as protector/advocate 5 Fox as victim advocate 6 Determining gender 6 Political territory (emergent) 10 Autonomy 10 Individualism 11 Cisgender discomfort 13 Religious/moral dog whistle 14 Responsibility 14 Fox decides victims/villains 17 Folk hero narrative 17 Civil/business dog whistle 19 Self-defense claim by cisgender person/group 19 Transgender perversion / violence 20 Mocking legitimacy 21 Realism 21 0 5 10 15 20 25

Figure 6: Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender persons as outside moral conformity

Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender persons as outside market conformity

Determining gender 5 Fox as protector/advocate 7 Fox as victim advocate 8 Religious/moral dog whistle 11 Transgender perversion / violence 12 Political territory (emergent) 14 Individualism 15 Autonomy 15 Responsibility 17 Cisgender discomfort 18 Fox decides victims/villains 19 Folk hero narrative 20 Mocking legitimacy 21 Self-defense claim by cisgender person/group 24 Realism 25 Civil/business dog whistle 26 0 5 10 15 20 25 30

Figure 7: Frequency of motifs under theme: Transgender persons as outside market conformity

Again, these motifs/elements are not mutually exclusive to any one theme or article, and so each motif/element could be found potentially in each article, and at times, multiple times in an article (yet only counted once per article). As the theme by theme breakout Figures 4-7 illustrate, any of these motifs can be used alongside any one of the four themes, and indeed alongside multiple simultaneous themes, to provide building blocks for the journalist.

To revisit, these motifs and elements have been synthesized from a number of sources

(Van Dijk, 1992; Diangelo, 2011; Marzullo, 2011; Peterson, 2011; Peck, 2014; Westbrook and

Schilt, 2014) to provide the basis for the conservative worldview toward transgender and gender non-conforming persons.